Experimental Results in Using Aerial LADAR Data for Mobile Robot Navigation

In this paper, we investigate the use of high resolution aerial LADAR data for autonomous mobile robot navigation in natural environments. The use of prior maps from aerial LADAR (LAser Detection And Ranging) survey is considered for enhancing system performance in two areas. First, the prior maps are used for registration with the data from the robot in order to compute accurate localization in the map. Second, the prior maps are used for computing detailed traversability maps that are used for planning over long distances. Our objective is to assess the key issues in using such data and to report on a first batch of experiments in combining high-resolution aerial data and on-board sensing